Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/12

Rh far the views of Pythagoras in founding his school or club of three hundred, tended towards uniting in this body the idea of “at once a philosophical school, a religious brotherhood, and a political association,” all which characters the Bishop of St. David's (Hist. of Greece, vol. ii. p. 148) thinks were inseparably united in his mind; while Mr. Grote's view of his object (Hist. of Greece, vol. iv. p. 544) is very different. In a political riot at Crotona, a temple, in which many of his disciples were assembled, was burnt, and they perished, and some say that Pythagoras himself was among them; though according to other accounts he fled to Tarentum, and afterwards to Metapontum, where he starved himself to death. His tomb (see Cic. de Fin. v. 2) was shown at Metapontum down to Cicero's time. Soon after his death his school was suppressed, and did not revive, though the Pythagoreans continued to exist as a sect, the members of which kept up the religious and scientific pursuits of their founder.

Pythagoras is said to have been the first who assumed the title of φιλόσοφος; but there is great uncertainty as to the most material of his philosophical and religious opinions. It is believed that he wrote nothing himself, and that the earliest Pythagorean treatises were the work of Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates. It appears, however, that he undertook to solve by reference to one single primary principle the problem of the origin and constitution of the universe. His predilection for mathematics led him to trace the origin of all things to number; for “in numbers he thought that they perceived many analogies of things that exist and are produced, more than in fire, earth, or water: as, for instance, they thought that a certain condition of numbers was justice; another, soul and intellect, And moreover, seeing the conditions and ratios of what pertains to harmony to consist in numbers, since other things seemed in their entire nature to be formed in the likeness of numbers, and in all nature numbers are the first, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things.” (Arist. Met. i. 5.)

Music and harmony too, played almost as important a